‘I bonded with Billie as a single mother’

SAM McALISTER, the TV producer behind the notorious Prince Andrew interview, says she connected with Billie Piper over their shared experience of being single mothers. Piper plays McAlister in Netflix film Scoop, which tells the story of the Newsnight interview from McAlister’s perspective.

“She comes from a similar-ish background to me. She’s had a period where she was bringing up a child on her own, so I felt she really got me,” McAlister told us at the premiere last night. “She got the hard work. She understood the moments of peril, the moments of elation, the moments of feeling a bit tearful, being overwhelmed, needing your mum to help out with your childcare. We had actually a lot of things in common, so we really bonded.” Piper has two children with controversialist Laurence Fox, whom she divorced in 2016 and recently described “enormous difficulty” co-parenting with him. McAlister’s old colleague Emily Maitlis, who is played in the film by Gillian Anderson, is making her own dramatisation of the interview with Amazon. Could there be a rivalry here? “We love to hear that women are at one another, but we’re really not,” McAlister told us. “Emily’s a brilliant journalist who’s written her own account of what happened to her. This is an account of what happened to me. They’re complementary. Enjoy them both.”